Join us to hear Dr. Sarah Pérez-Kriz present at the Autumn HCDE seminar series (HCDE 521) this Thursday from 5:00 to 5:50 p.m. in Mary Gates Hall 241!

Title: Understanding and Improving Interdisciplinary Aspects of STEM Education
When: Thursday, November 4, from 5:00 to 5:50 p.m.
Where: Mary Gates Hall 241

Abstract: As students advance through the American higher education system, they are trained to become specialists in a particular discipline. However, current research trends show that transformative research is being conducted at the crossroads of several disciplines. Programs and centers of nanotechnology, biotechnology, cognitive neuroscience, and artificial intelligence exist at most research universities and bring together researchers from a variety of traditional science and engineering disciplines. But are students prepared for these types of collaborations? In this talk I will discuss my research on interdisciplinary STEM education and provide some tips for successful interdisciplinary collaborations.

About the Speaker: Dr. Sarah Pérez-Kriz is an assistant professor in the department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington, where she teaches courses on cognitive theory and HCI, graphic communication, and experimental methods. She is also the director of the Human-Robot Communication Laboratory, which is home to Bucky, a PeopleBot robot made by MobileRobots Inc. With formal training in both linguistics and cognitive psychology, Dr. Kriz’s research interests include understanding how people manage social and cognitive pressures during communication, graphic communication and information visualizations, and human factors testing of robotics systems.